


The Great Wide Somewhere

by AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 11:26:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8142047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: Belle has something to tell Adam.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Who Shot AR (akerwis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/gifts).



> Thank you to misbegotten for betaing!

Belle heard Adam’s footsteps approaching over the crackling of the fireplace. “I wish my mother were here,” she said, damp handkerchief in hand, staring out the window at the dismal winter sky. “Mrs. Potts is marvelous, but she’s…not the same.”

Adam sat down beside her and wrapped one strong arm around her. “Tell me about your mother?”

“Her name was Aglaé,” Belle began, and stopped. What else was there to say? How could she encapsulate her mother into a handful of words? “She grew herbs. She liked to write—she taught me to read with the silliest rhymes. She—” Belle stopped, took a shaky breath, started again. “I was ten the year she died. Half my life ago.” She leaned into Adam, sniffling. “It’s silly, to want something so badly when I so—so certainly can’t have it. The laws of nature, and—and magic, and—”

“I don’t remember my mother,” Adam said slowly. “I know her name was Vivienne, and at certain times of year my father was very sad because of her. The first snowfall, and the first blossoms. But asking about her only made him sadder.”

“Vivienne,” murmured Belle. “That’s a lovely name.”

“Yes,” said Adam, and fell silent.

A few moments later, Belle said abruptly, “Maybe I should go down to the village—” She stopped again. “No, that’s no use, they _still_ think I’m odd.”

“You _are_ odd,” Adam observed playfully. “The most delightful sort of odd, as shown by how you perpetually delight me.”

Belle laughed. “You’re not helping, you know.”

“What am I to help with?” he asked, serious again. “Mrs. Potts wouldn’t tell me—she said I had to hear it from you.”

“Very sensible of her,” said Belle. “I warn you, this will utterly spoil our plans for adventuring throughout the British Isles next spring and perhaps indefinitely.”

“That sounds—” Adam paused. “What’s the word you use when something looks like it’s warning of danger?”

Belle burst out laughing. When she could breathe again, she suggested, “Ominous? Portentous?”

“Ominous,” Adam repeated. “Yes. That sounds ominous. And I don’t know why that should amuse you.”

“It’s nothing horrible,” Belle assured him. “It might not even go wrong. I’m sure Mrs. Potts won’t let anything go wrong if she can help it.”

“You’re worrying me.”

Belle pulled away a little so she could turn enough to see Adam’s face. She _had_ to see his expression at this exciting and terrifying little revelation.

“I’m with child.”

Adam’s eyes went wide. Slowly he shook his head.

“Oh,” he said sadly. “Oh, Belle.”

She turned to look back out at the snow beginning to fall: cold inside, though the room was warm.

“It will be all right,” Adam said, but his voice rose at the end of the sentence, as though he were asking a question his choice of syntax wouldn’t allow.

“Of course it will,” Belle answered; she could hear the monotone in her own voice. He wouldn’t hear that to mean she was certain—how could he, when it wasn’t true? In so many of her favorite books, the hero’s or heroine’s mother had died in childbed— “I wish my mother were here,” Belle said again. “She grew herbs, and made tinctures and infusions and salves, and I don’t, I _do not_ remember all the uses and preparations of every one of them.”

Adam said nothing.

Unwilling to let the silence ring on, Belle continued. “There are probably books in our library that have some of what she knew. But not all, I think. Most of it, she would not have written down, and I think her mother could not have…” Adam stayed silent, so Belle kept speaking: “There must be other village healers. I don’t think _this_ village has had a true healer since my mother died, but other villages—or there are always doctors—and Mrs. Potts will help; you know she will. For that matter, I have helped enough farm animals successfully birth their infants.”

“Farm animals!” Adam burst out. “Belle, we are talking about risking you to have a _baby_.”

“Yes,” said Belle without looking at him, thinking of cradling an infant in her arms and reading to her the same nonsense rhymes Aglaé had read to a tiny Belle. “I suppose we are.”

A long silence.

“Belle,” said Adam at last, “tell me you’ll live through this. Lie to me if you must.”

“Women live through childbirth _every day_ ,” Belle said. The snowfall was beginning to shift to a diagonal. “I don’t—”

She paused.

“How did your mother die?” she asked.

Adam sighed. “I am told I was three days old.”

Belle looked up at him. “I’m sorry you never had the chance to know her.”

He gazed down at her. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t,” Belle said firmly. “Our child is going to have a mother, as surely as she will have a father.” She got up from the sofa. “I’ll find a village that still has a real healer.” Belle walked over to the window, crumpling her handkerchief in her hand, staring out into the snow. “We’ll bring her to the castle if she’ll come. She might not, of course.” The wind was picking up. “But she’ll help as best she can, because that’s what she’s sworn to do. If she’ll teach me, I’ll learn everything I can, as my mother would have taught me. We’ll be ready for anything that could go wrong when the baby comes.”

Belle turned halfway, enough to look back at Adam. “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “I’m here to stay.”

Adam smiled.

“It’s odd,” Belle went on, noticing the snow in the branches of one of the trees outside—a willow; an extract of its leaves could treat so many ills: the first lesson Belle’s mother had taught her, and so the first Belle must teach her daughter. “I never thought it was important to remember the things my mother taught me that I couldn’t learn from books, until it was years too late.”

Adam stood and came over to her, embracing her from behind, placing one hand across her belly. She leaned back against him, feeling the warmth of the fire even at this distance, even so close to the chilled glass window.

“A _baby_ ,” he said, and this time his voice held a touch of awe.

“Aglaé Vivienne,” Belle said.

Adam said, “Yes.”


End file.
